What we do
The Open Machine is a cultural outpost for scaling underground values alongside, within and through emerging technologies. We produce media & events and stage research on the actualization of extitutional social forms in the twenty first century.
Institutions (in their dominant form as centralized, administrative bureaucracies) are known to concentrate power, homogenize culture, enshittify technology, obscure empirical conditions in favor of party lines and, worst of all, generate cultures of complacency where direct empirical engagement with reality is sidelined for the opiate coziness of a protected inside.
The Open Machine is premised on an alternative mode of social organization, an emergent programme of values and operational principles we refer to as protocol underground
In an age of ascendant existential technologies, the emergent principles of the underground are in a position to scale to dominance as cynical actors and obsolete formulas fall beneath the compounding increase in degrees of freedom the new forms provide.
The Open Machine is here to midwife that process. Our work is to discover alignment and build coalitions (and lineages) around key underground values. This also means recognizing the open, public and horizontally determined nature of the values themselves.
Media
Open Machine media takes the form of zines, books, posters, and other web content. All work is licensed Creative Commons. In some cases, our work is commissioned by aligned actors in technology or the academic space.
Events
To the end of bringing underground values and strategies to the emerging technology space, and vice versa, The Open Machine has produced salons, workshops, unconferences, meetups, and the rare lecture.
Gathering - Open Protocols Convene, Boulder, Colorado 2025
Salon - Open Protocols Social, Portland, Oregon 2025
Workshop - Polycentric Equity Swap Game, Devconnect Buenos Aires, Argentina 2025
Workshop - Assembly in Ethereum, Schelling Point Devconnect Buenos Aires, Argentina 2025
Gathering - GFEL II, Boulder, Colorado 2025
Workshop - Institutions, Extitutions and the Body without Organs - Huy, Belgium 2024
Salon - OSS: Open Salon Series, Portland, Oregon 2024
Lecture Series - Local DAO Summer, cyberspace 2024
Salon - Imagination Circle - Portland, Oregon 2024
Gathering - General Forum on Ethereum Localism, Portland, Oregon 2024
Salon - Cybernetics and Public Goods, MCON 3 - Detroit, Michigan 2023
Salon - Decentralized Independent Publishing as Protocol, Devcon - Istanbul, Turkey 2023
Salon - Crypto's Philosophical Underground - Barcelona 2023
Salon - Who weaves the weavers?, SeoulBound, Seoul, Korea, 2023
Research
The Open Machine conducts research on the spontaneous orders, open protocols, and plural ontologies of the space outside of administrative institutions, and its clashes with an emerging front of social capture, enclosure and control. As an extitution, our goal is to produce practical, materially grounded knowledge-sets that might evolve into open protocols adequate to the new technological landscape.
Post-Capitalist Venture Capital
Commissioned project in collaboration with Open Civics Labs to identify strategies for ethical venture capital that exploit the legitimacy crisis of late stage capitalism and anticipate a post-capitalist transition. Final product forthcoming for Allo Capital.
Hyperactive Public Goods Funding
Research project bundling web3 capital allocation mechanisms into a modular apparatus to effectively fund public goods projects from early stage to end-cycle verification. Made possible with the help of Public Nouns.
Open Protocol Research Group
Multi-year cohort working in the context of Ethereum Localism to find formal isomorphism between open source web protocols and open protocols of urban cultural spaces. Made possible with funding from Arbitrum Grants and Ethereal Forest.
Intensive Protocols
Ongoing research looking into underground technologies for affective, nondual or nonordinary experience. This project engages neurophenomenology and computational modeling of qualia in order to develop digital renderings of underground assemblages.
Guild Guild
Ethnographic study of the guilds of the protocol underground, with a focus on protocolization as a means of supporting and maintaining the extitutional clarity of the groups themselves.
Values
Our engagement with the archive and ethnographic study of underground communities alerted us to five principles (or four key values + one major operational principle) that animate the underground.
The underground is a recessive organism, resisting formalization or categorization even as it generates abundant protocols that depend on both of those tactics to persist. We generate this formal account not in order to enclose the underground, but because we our confident in our position that it cannot be enclosed.
High Agency
Participants actively shape situations, infrastructures, and outcomes through situated and emergent decision-making. Agency circulates rather than concentrates, expressed through improvisation, responsibility, and the capacity to act without delegated authority.
Open Aesthetic
Aesthetic coherence is dynamic, arising and changing with the gestalt of the network. Subjection to an aesthetic condition is forsaken for a challenge to participate and codetermine a performance.
Consent Forward
Coordination is grounded in explicit, situated agreements that are continuously renegotiated. Boundaries, roles, and intensities remain legible to participants, enabling trust, experimentation, and mutual care under conditions of risk and transformation.
Process Oriented
Attention is directed toward unfolding, qualitative dynamics rather than quantitative, static outcomes. This means emphasis on intensive experience or "qualia" - affect, epiphany, synchronicity, the nondual, and most importantly the experience of dissolution into larger subjectivities.
+ Open Protocolized
Practices crystallize into reusable patterns through a kind of natural selection in the "cold exterior" of the extitutional realm. Weathered by the exterior, open protocols develop an acute, open empiricism, manifested as (a) availability to appropriation, forking, recombination to whatever material , aesthetic or epistemic ends, (b) resistance to and avoidance of any system that compromises (a), and (c) compact and compelling enough form to facilitate free & open circulation.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | The Open Machine
Built from the underground